I thought etbe's questions, "Two
Questions
for All Serious Free Software Contributors", deserved an
article, so I posted one.
I think quite a lot of what people write in their
diary^Wblog entries here would be more useful as short
articles. There's no better way to increase the incidence
of useful articles than to post them.

dmarti: The only reason I can think of
ever to throttle a CPU is if it's running a "screen saver".
(Quote marks because they don't save anything on an LC
display.) Then, of course, the best clock rate is zero. On
a related note, I think it's irresponsible that (e.g.) Gnome
doesn't default to "xset dpms 0 0 1800" or similar.

OK, I joined ohloh. (It
must be getting hard to come up with a name that Google has
nothing else to say about.) Ohloh will be more interesting
when they learn to count better; maybe Google will buy them
and fix that and make it faster. In the meantime it's kind
of fun. My only serious gripe is that they conflate C++ and
C code together as "C/C++"; "Java/C#" as one entry would
make more sense. Maybe the best thing about it, so far, is
the map: when you tell it where you live, it shows markers
for other Free Software people nearby. It will get better
as more people join. That would be fun to have in Advogato.

Today I deleted the Orkut group "Stupidity". It was the
only one of my Orkut groups that achieved membership of more
than 1000. (Curiously, the overwhelming majority were
Pakistani nationals.) However, it utterly failed in its
purpose, which was as a place to discuss Prof. Cipolla's theory of
stupidity, with its enigmatic constant σ, the
fraction of any given population, however selected, who can
be counted upon to exhibit stupidity. (There may be some
irony there: quite possibly the value of σ found in
that pocket universe would have sharply contradicted the
hypothesis of its constancy.) The theory, meanwhile, is in
eclipse, as the professor's literary executors have
worked diligently to scour what they claim are immature
drafts of it from visibility on the 'net, effacing him from
public memory in the process. It's not clear whether that
is also ironic.

I noticed recently that dmarti's diary
entries were marked with an interest level of "1", obscuring
them from most readers' view. I added a "10" to the mix; I
hope that's enough to restore him to visibility, but he may
need others' help too.

etbe: ... and you can pump heat out of a
big solar water heater tank to produce a smaller amount of
hotter water. If you can bury a big water tank, you can use
Ted Taylor's scheme to save up cold from the winter by
misting brine and draining the slush to the tank, to use as
a heat sink in summer. You can pre-heat water going into
your solar water heater with heat extracted by your heat
pump while cooling your house. Heat pumps can be remarkably
versatile once you get the plumbing right.

I've had a new insight about atmospheric carbon dioxide.
It's not something you'll see published
elsewhere, because it's nuanced, and public discussions of
global warming don't tolerate nuance. Anyway: the great
weakness in atmospheric simulations is that they have no way
at all to model cloud cover. Nobody knows what the effect
of anything will be on cloud cover, despite that
cloud cover affects absolutely everything climatic. (Some
people have pretty good evidence that cloud cover is
affected by solar activity and even by cosmic ray flux.) This
means that even the very best models can't really tell us
anything about the climatic effects of CO2 under conditions
where cloud cover is changing, despite that a different
climate will certainly have different cloud cover.

Why, then, should we worry about CO2? First, it clearly
has been a primary influence on runaway global warming so
far, and that ought to be enough to freak out anybody.
(Cloud cover shows no sign of jumping up to save us yet!)
But even if cloud cover were to jump and save us
(and, who knows, plunge us into an ice age?), CO2 is
certainly a direct cause of
coral bleaching (via dissolution in the ocean, forming
carbonic acid) and the crash of reef ecologies, the basis of
the ocean ecosystem. We take millions of tons of food from
the ocean ecosystem every year. Any sane person should find
that enough reason, alone, to move heaven and earth to cut
CO2 releases. Uncertainty over the effect of CO2 on the
climate only redoubles the urgency.

I'm just back from the C++ Standard meeting in Toronto. For the
next ISO C++ standard, the Standard Library will have regular
expressions, threads, and sockets, and the language will have
lambda (i.e. code in brackets passed as an argument)
and auto
variables (i.e. the variable or argument declaration takes its
type from the value used to initialize it). Equally
interesting,
but mainly to library authors, is concepts, which
allows writing
(even more!) powerful libraries that give actually-readable
error
messages at compile time if you misuse them. I say "even more"
because with concepts the library can compile to different
code if it's passed (e.g.) a literal string than if passed a
pointer.
The combination of regular expressions, lambda, and concepts
means we can write yacc as a C++ library, and offer both better
error messages and faster parsing than yacc can.

OpenMoko is
shaping up as way cooler
than iPhone. There's no way I'd ever buy an iPhone
(<grumble> AT&T carrier-locked
</grumble>), but I am seriously considering an
OpenMoko, come October, even at the (sigh) new US$450 price.
The extra $100 appears to buy wifi, another 192M of flash,
3D video acceleration, and a pair of 3D accelerometers.
Wifi is pretty significant, but I suspect the accelerometers
will make all the difference in how much fun can be had
programming it. They go a long way to make up for not
having added more buttons.